


real ghosts

by hibiscxs



Series: Release [3]
Category: Legacies (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Heterosexual Sex, Inexplicit Sex, Nonlinear Narrative, Older Man/Younger Woman, Teacher-Student Relationship, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, ergo the pronoun game, heavy on the pronoun game, mostly bc i listened to it a lot while writing this, ost: she - harry styles, well i think its inexplicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:20:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25978096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hibiscxs/pseuds/hibiscxs
Summary: He begs for his ghosts to have moved on, and she cries for the ones still with her.They’re the real ghosts, the ones left behind, the ones without the option of a peaceful afterlife.Legacies 1x06-1x07
Relationships: Hope Mikaelson/Alaric Saltzman, Josette "Jo" Laughlin/Alaric Saltzman
Series: Release [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1873672
Comments: 14
Kudos: 44





	real ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out another perk of posting works in a series instead of chapters in a work is that I'll allow myself to try out different styles. I love a nonlinear narrative.

He watches her disintegrate under the hands of their daughters—

_— no, his daughters, his and Caroline’s, not hers, not in any way that matters—_

— and he has to say goodbye to Josette Laughlin—

_(almost Saltzman, she says accusingly, as if he could ever forget)_

— for the third time. When she’s gone, he hugs his girls to his chest in a way he never has, he has never needed to; they always had each other, always had Caroline.

He cries like he hasn’t since she died.

* * *

On Remembrance Day, he writes a letter to her like he has every year for the past decade.

 _I miss you,_ it says.

 _I’m glad the girls got to meet you,_ it says.

 _I hope you’re at peace,_ it says.

It lays on her tombstone, folded up into a pretty flower. When Rafael comes to him, looking for guidance, Ric promises to try to help make him a better man. Rafael doesn’t see that he doesn’t know what that is anymore.

He pretends he can’t feel Hope’s gaze, familiar and heavy and guilty like a lover’s touch, from across the graveyard.

 _I wish you could’ve just stayed in the ground, I never wanted the girls to feel cheated like this, I hope you aren't watching me fail,_ it doesn’t say.

* * *

His disastrous second wedding replays in his head as he turns his old ring in his hand. He kept it all these years, and so there has been a dusty aspirin bottle in his dresser drawer that rattles with three rings—

_— Isobel, Jo, Caroline—_

— three failed attempts at a normal life. 

He places the ring on her grave in a symbolic gesture that ultimately amounts to nothing, because he will never really escape her. The twins’ 22nd birthday will still loom over his head like an execution date. The ascendant, hidden in a box behind a glamour, will still call to him like a demon at a crossroads every time Caroline chases a lead across the world to a dead end. He will still wake up in the dead of night, sweating and gasping, having watched red bloom over her wedding dress like a flower.

* * *

He retrieves the half-empty bottle he had been in the process of throwing away— another empty gesture. 

There are still traces of her on him— saliva drying down his neck, mascara staining his shirt, tears salting his lips.

He uncaps the bottle and washes her away with whiskey.

* * *

The Necromancer’s face is a twisted mass of scar tissue and gleeful, malicious eyes. It feels almost too good to smash the blade of a shovel into it. They drag his body down to the basement— the werewolf transition spaces, the dungeons, whatever they’re called now— and dump him in a cage.

Ric wants to slap him awake, to demand why he did this, to carve into his grey flesh until he bleeds retribution. Dorian forces Ric back up the stairs with advice _(you need sleep),_ promises _(we can interrogate him in the morning),_ and threats _(go back down there and I’ll get Hope to knock you out)._ He grits his teeth, returns to his empty bed, and tries to find sleep at the bottom of a bottle.

He fails.

* * *

Her shoulders shake as she clutches herself to him, her tears dripping mascara into the chest of his shirt. He lets her hold onto him, because she has no one else, but doesn’t speak, doesn’t kiss her tears away. He’s still too angry with her for it. 

Her arousal still coats his soft cock, pressed against her cum-smeared thigh. How many eyes are on them right now?

Eventually, she pushes away from him, her tears dried up. She rolls up her tights and her panties, swipes a finger underneath her eyes to clean up as best she can, and leaves without a word. He lets her.

* * *

In a liquored haze he pretends he is still holding her, that she is still there with him instead of in whatever warm and happy place she had described. He reaches his hand across the bed and tries to imagine her laying beside him, her dark hair spread over the pillow, her unique taste of coffee and Thai food on his lips, her warmth soaking into the sheets. 

But his hand finds only empty space. Whatever warmth he is searching for isn’t there, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

And then, the sheets crumpled in his fist, he can see a different figure in his bed. The sheets are no strangers to her heat. The hair spilling across the pillow is auburn, not black. He can taste on his lips whipped cream from a milkshake, powdered sugar from beignets, salt from sweat and tears, copper from blood. Each flavor is as fresh on his tongue as the bourbon he swallows, more vivid and real than coffee and Thai food have been in over a decade.

It’s easy to picture her body splayed out on his bed—

_— beside him, underneath him—_

— easier than it is to picture Jo or Jenna or Isobel. 

He craves her, and he hates it.

* * *

_(I used to watch you. I used to watch all of you, she says. Her disappointment coats his skin like oil, but maybe he only imagines it, maybe it’s only the making of his own shame)_

She presses her forehead to his chest and cries over her ghosts.

He wonders when Jo had stopped watching them. When Caroline became the girls’ mother? When they had discovered their magic? He prays to whatever god is out there— he doesn’t know at this point— that she had left them behind before she could witness him try to maintain control over this school, witness him fail day after day, witness him crave and give into a steady supply of bourbon and Hope Mikaelson.

He begs for his ghosts to have moved on, and she cries for the ones still with her.

They’re the real ghosts, the ones left behind, the ones without the option of a peaceful afterlife. They have no say in when they can move on.

* * *

By sunrise, his numb haze has turned into a throbbing headache. He calls Caroline and thanks the powers of compulsion when he has the girls out the door and in a cab to the airport within two hours. 

The Necromancer is a poor prisoner for a warden as vengeful as Ric. He doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, doesn’t bleed. Every pulled-out fingernail or cut into his dead flesh is a mere nuisance that heals up whenever Ric turns his back.

After several failed attempts to get him to come up for food or rest, Dorian finally sends her. She marches in with Rafael at her heels and threatens force of the physical and magical kind. Ric is tempted to tell them to fuck off, but she glares at him with a raised eyebrow like she can read his thoughts.

It’s only when he sees his prisoner eyeing her like a dish at a banquet does he promise he’ll take a break soon.

She leaves, but her eyes linger on the Necromancer with too much curiosity, and when her footsteps finally disappear up the stairs, he laughs. _Klaus Mikaelson’s daughter,_ he cackles. His black tongue darts out to wet his shriveled lips. _What a treat!_

Ric stabs a knife into his thigh and tells him to stay the hell away from his students.

When he finally emerges from the basement, she and Rafael are talking in the commons. Shame threatens to swallow him whole.

She is healing.

He is thinking of what she looks like in his bed.

She catches his eye and rises, but he shuts himself away behind office doors and waterfalls of bourbon.

* * *

When it’s over, their bodies still quivering against the other’s, he presses his forehead to the couch underneath her. Copper hair sticks with sweat to his lips.

“He said my dad watches me everyday,” she whispers against his skin. 

_(daddy’s home)_

He shudders under the weight of the ghosts that watch them.

_(I used to watch you. I used to watch all of you)_

Then, she breaks.

* * *

In the end, it takes a week for her crack. He is unsurprised— disappointed, furious, but unsurprised— when MG comes to him in a panic. He stands in front of the cage and watches, waits, while she shakes and flounders, drowns in the bottomless ocean of the Necromancer’s mind. She gasps when she resurfaces. He is only surprised by the immediate regret she stares back at him with.

 _Daddy’s home,_ the monster croons between them.

* * *

He crushes her first to the wall and then the couch, kisses deep and harsh in his anger and her despair. Her touch is a brand on his skin, the heat he has wanted all week.

She isn’t wet enough, but she pulls at him impatiently, hissing that she doesn’t care, _it doesn’t matter, I just need you._ Her gasp of pain morphs into a moan when he pushes into her. It’s rough and hard—

_— harder, harder, she begs—_

— and spread around her head is the copper halo he had half-dreamed about.

* * *

Her walls go back up the second he commands her into his office, anger dripping from his tongue. It’s what she does when she doesn’t want to admit that she’s wrong— she gets defensive, she pushes people away. She’s like her father like that. She slams his half-empty bottle of bourbon onto the desk so hard he thinks it might shatter— shatter like any and all control he could have had over the situation.

In that moment, he hates her. He hates her walls, her anger; hates the cursed blood that flows through her veins, the blood he knows the taste of; hates the copper hair he had imagined spread across his pillow and the tears on her cheeks that he wants to kiss away. The hate spills from his mouth, is spat in her direction. But it’s when his disappointment follows that she snaps.

“Don’t you dare play disappointed dad, because you are not my father!” she shouts in his face.

“Oh, I know that,” he sneers. Isn’t that the problem?

She’s a storm flying over water. The slammed door is a slap, the entrapment spell a pair of hands wrapped around his throat. He shouts her name after her and pounds his hand into the heavy wood when all he gets is silence in return.

* * *

“I know I fucked up,” she whispers against his unmoving lips. He knows hers will taste like familiar salt, familiar tears. “I know you’re angry, but please…”

He stares down into her pleading eyes, and relents. He relents because he held his long-dead fiancée in his arms a week ago; because when she disappeared under his daughters’ hands, he cried like it was only the first time she had died; because after, when his tears had evaporated with his whiskey, he had craved Hope and her copper hair, copper tongue; because for the first time since this thing between them started, he realized he needed it as much as she did, even if he would never admit it aloud.

She sees the shift in him before he voices it. Her fingers dip under her skirt to roll down her tights with her panties. That ugly desire he had felt in his liquored haze—

_— had felt, has been feeling, feels—_

— pushes through his limbs, his mouth, his tongue.

He licks at the salt on her lips.

* * *

There are still tears blurring her vision when she takes down the entrapment spell and opens the door to his office. He stares at her, anger still simmering underneath a surface of resignation, expectation. The bottles of alcohol she had waved in his face in her anger are halfway into a garbage bag.

“He’s gone,” she croaks.

“I expected as much,” he says, his face like stone.

_(As for your father, he watches over you everyday, the Necromancer whispers from the other side of the bars. Which side is she on?)_

She barely thinks about it before she tries to wash the salt from her lips with the drink on his, but his lips remain still above hers. She grips his face, wants to dig her fingers into his skin, pull herself into him and him into her. 

_(But he won’t find peace)_

“I know I fucked up. I know you’re angry, but please…” she pleads. She watches as his eyes soften in pity, in longing, in grief.

_(until you do)_

She spreads her legs for him and sips the bourbon from his tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> Have I said 1x06 and 1x07 are my favorite episodes?


End file.
